After nearly 10 years at sports giant ESPN, Elle Duncan departed last month to join Netflix — coming on board as the streamer’s first sports anchor.
Her first tour of duty for Netflix: This Friday’s “Skyscraper Live,” in which free-solo climber Alex Honnold will attempt to scale Taipei 101 — the tallest building in Taiwan, at 1,667 feet — without any ropes or safety equipment. Duncan and her team of commentators, she says, will be “trying to entertain people at the same time that we’re watching someone do something that could kill him.”
Why did she exit ESPN? In a nutshell, Duncan says she had done as much as she could do at the network, with limited opportunities given ESPN’s extensive roster of talent. Netflix made her a compelling offer for a job that will let her spread her wings beyond sports per se. The Netflix gig, she says, is “sports plus.”
“You know, I did really incredible, remarkable things at ESPN that obviously were pegged to sports. But I’ve always been, and prided myself on being, a utility player and really trying to push and test my versatility,” Duncan tells Variety. “So Netflix gave me an opportunity to stay in sports, which I love and am passionate about, to do it at a major scale with major events, and then to also dabble into things like [‘Skyscraper Live’], which is sort of sports-adjacent.”
At Netflix, says Duncan, “I would say that the sky is the limit.” The opportunity is to “do MLB opening day and then maybe be in the running for a reality show.”
Duncan’s agent, Matt Olson, recently told Sports Business Journal that Netflix — unlike ESPN — offers the ability “for her to be the number one [sports talent] there.” Asked if that means she is now a big fish in a small pond, Duncan laughs.
“I definitely don’t look at it that way,” she says. It was “not like some, you know, ego boost that I needed to be at a place where I could be, you know, autonomous. Moreso that, as I sort of outlooked the next four years at ESPN — that’s what they were offering me, was a four-year deal — it was like, ‘OK, where are additional opportunities to continue to grow and expand? How do I get to keep sort of women’s basketball, which I love so much [and] continue [with] football, my favorite sport. Like how do I continue to grow into those spaces?’”
Duncan continues, “And ESPN is well represented in all of those spaces with really incredible talent. And it is not my style at all to politic or to go into offices and try to convince management to make changes simply because I would like to take on additional roles. And they’re good there. They are not lacking talent at ESPN.
“So I think when we sort of outlook to the future, it was like, if I was doing the exact same thing I’m doing right now for the next four years, would that be fulfilling? And I think ultimately we landed on ‘No,’” she says.
Says Duncan, “You know, I wanted to try and push myself and do even more things. And where was the best opportunity to do that? And it was Netflix.”
Last fall, Netflix hired Kate Jackson, one of Duncan’s producers at ESPN, as director of live sports. “She sort of joked when she left, like, ‘I’m going to come for you,’” Duncan says. “So once we were in our negotiating window, a couple of months out, we got a really, really strong offer from Netflix who knew that one of the biggest draws would be opportunity outside of sports, but also freedom and flexibility of schedule.”
Netflix is “my main course,” Duncan explains. “They get first right of refusal… They’re my main thing, but they also know that I have a love and passion for women’s sports, which is famously not a part of their portfolio yet. And so they really are bullish on the fact that they want me to take opportunities and projects that I’m passionate about, so long as they don’t interfere with my responsibilities for them.”
Netflix — which used to routinely dismiss its interest in acquiring sports rights — now has deals with the NFL (it aired two Christmas Day games in 2024 and 2025), Major League Baseball (for an opening night game this season and other events), and WWE’s “Raw.” In addition, Netflix inked a deal for exclusive rights in the U.S. to the 2027 and 2031 installments of the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
“Because they have such a huge commitment to sports for the future, they really wanted to have someone that would be sort of a central figure that no matter what the sports event was,” Duncan says.
For “Skyscraper Live,” Duncan flew to Taipei last Saturday. Joining her to provide live commentary will be professional rock climber Emily Harrington, YouTube creator Mark Rober (whose show “CrunchLabs” is on Netflix), WWE star Seth Rollins and climbing commentator Pete Woods. The event will begin livestreaming Friday, Jan. 23, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT (9 a.m. Taiwan time).
Duncan’s two kids, ages 5 and 7, were seriously impressed when they learned she would be working with Rober. “I’ve introduced these kids to every famous person,” she says. When they found out their mom was going to on the air with him, “They were shook,” Duncan says. “Like, they could not believe I was going to do TV with the Mark Rober.”
To state the obvious, it’s not a typical sporting event. “This is like pass or fail, life or death, right?” says Duncan. “This particular event is much more about the storytelling… This is really about contextualizing the kind of person that would do something so seemingly crazy and death-defying. Like trying to humanize Alex as a person, and trying to sort of explain the art of climbing to an audience that isn’t necessarily going to understand that.”
In December, Duncan visited Honnold at his home in Red Rock, Nevada, and some of those conversations will be weaved throughout the “Skyscraper Live” package. Another prerecorded bit: Duncan’s producers convinced her to tackle one of the particularly “interesting” parts of the Taipei 101 climb. “They’re going to have me go out there — strapped up, obviously, not free soloing!” she says. “It should go well. Which to me is just surviving.”
What happens if Honnold slips and falls? Without elaborating, Duncan says the team has “contingency plans for everything,” including for things like inclement weather or an earthquake.
In the short time she’s been at Netflix, Duncan says she has already seen that the company is willing to try new things. After all, because Netflix is so new to the sports field, it doesn’t have an established playbook. Netflix has “a culture of transparency, talking through things, making decisions quickly, failing fast, taking big swings, learning and moving on,” says Duncan. She’s staying in West Hartford, Connecticut (near ESPN’s Bristol headquarters), “despite the fact that with my new Netflix job, I can move anywhere.”
Duncan joined ESPN in 2016, where she hosted the 6 p.m. ET edition of “SportsCenter” and led coverage across women’s college and pro basketball, including hosting “College GameDay” and “WNBA Countdown.”
She concedes that it was hard to leave ESPN. “Every place that I have left in my career, I’ve been sad to go because of the people,” Duncan says. “But I was very much at peace with the decision. You know, I really did not take the decision lightly. I waited. I looked at every possible scenario. I prayed on it. I talked about it. I talked to my therapist about it. So when I had to say goodbye, I felt really, really good about the decision itself.”
Source: variety.com
